8. Full Metal Jacket
Overshadowed by Platoon being released the same year, Full Metal Jacket is the superior film even if Platoon did walk away with Best Picture that year. Where films like Platoon and Saving Private Ryan focused on being as realistic as possible in order to show the horror of war, Full Metal Jacket is intentionally off-kilter and is told in a fragmented manner with half the film devoted to the training of a group of soldiers with the second half covering the actual war. The best performance, and the lasting image most people remember from the film, is gunnery Sergeant Hartman who abuses incoming recruits with a torrent of abuses both verbal and physical. His method works all too well, his recruits are turned into killing machines, even the chubby weakling Gomer Pyle. Pyle eventually kills both himself and Hartman at the end of training in an act that illustrates both the self-destructive consequences of war and the unnaturalness of turning ordinary people into hardened killers. Being a Stanley Kubrick film, Full Metal Jacket is nearly flawless technically and many of the scenes in the last half of the film contain images of astonishing power. Fragmented and powerful, Full Metal Jacket doesn't pretend to answer questions about the nature of war but instead shows us the horror and confusion with some of the most memorable scenes of Kubrick's illustrious career.